I liked the description of the numbers by Tim Glanfield, on Beehive City. He called them "fluffy", and, after trying to make sense of them, he complained: "My head hurts."

George Brock, head of City University London's journalism department, was distinctly unimpressed with the News Int's release of "sales" figures for The Times and Sunday Times websites.

"Any business journalist on either title confronted with this sort of chicanery from another company in the online market would gleefully rip into the executives releasing numbers in such opaque form."

There were some good attempts to get at the truth. Best of the bunch: Robert Andrewshere and Dan Sabbaghhere. See also an apposite comment from Adam Tinworth.

So, rather than joining in with the speculation, and refusing to be negative, the blog argues that "getting people to pay for news online is at this stage still more of a philosophical adventure than a business proposition", and concludes:

"We're kind of impressed that 105,000 people have been persuaded to part with any money at all for something they can get in pretty similar form for free elsewhere."

It isn't 105,000 people of course (see Tinworth). But it's a fair point.